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The Children of Manifest Destiny

Andrew Jackson drove a convoy of chained slaves. It was known as a ‘coffle.’

By

Fergus M. Bordewich

Jan. 22, 2016 1:21 p.m. ET

In 1834, the slave trader Isaac Franklin wrote to a colleague that “the old Lady and Susan”—a pair of slaves—“could soon pay for themselves by keeping a whore house. . . . It might be . . . established at your place [in] Alexandria or Baltimore for the exclusive use of the [concern] and [its] agents.” Such a blunt acknowledgment of the sexual exploitation of enslaved women was unusual but not unique in the antebellum South, as Ned and Constance Sublette make clear in “The American Slave Coast,” an often heart-wrenching descent into one of the darkest corners of slavery’s history.